When Your Manager Is Afraid of You

Kate, a 33-year-old marketing associate, sounded exhausted and confused. “It’s the weirdest thing,” she said. “I started my job ten months ago and got off to a great start. I launched our company’s first HTML newsletter. I started a client service training program that got great reviews. My six-month performance review was stellar. Then two months ago, the whole thing started to go sour.”

“How so?” I wanted to know.

“My boss has started picking at me over tiny, stupid things,” she said. “He told me at my review that he was going to send me to our France office to help them build a messaging strategy, but when I asked him about it recently he said, ‘That’s something we have to look at down the road,’ and walked away. It’s like I’ve gone from being his favorite employee to dog meat.”

“It was our VP of Sales,” said Kate. “I work with him a lot, and he had seen me speak to some client service reps. I tagged along with two of our area sales managers on a big sales call and we won the business, so he likes me for that reason, too. It’s cool — my colleagues told me they don’t usually let marketing people like me come to those sales meetings, much less ask them to speak.”

“So, what other balls have you knocked out of the park lately?”

“There’s nothing else,” she said. “I created an internal discussion community for the sales team — I guess that’s something. Okay, and I pulled our CEO’s and our VPs’ speeches out of the archives and organized them in a catalog that we can refer to going forward and use in customer communications.”

“Sister, please!” I exclaimed. ” You’ve been in the job ten months. You’re doing amazing things and changing the energy in your shop. No wonder your boss is terrified. He worries that you’ll outshine him.”

“Oh, that’s ridiculous,” Kate scoffed. “My boss has been at the company for twenty-eight years.”

“Big deal!” I said. “The VP of Sales asked you to speak at his annual sales meeting. You pulled the executive speeches archive together on your own. You launched a newsletter, you built a training program. You haven’t even had your one-year anniversary. What has your boss done in that time?”

“I guess—” started Kate. “I didn’t think about that. But why would he worry? He’s an executive, for Pete’s sake.”

“So he has a lot at stake,” I said. “He has a lot of status to lose, and doesn’t know the outside world you just popped in from. You launched an HTML newsletter and your boss doesn’t have a clue how to run the engine if you disappear one day. You’re speaking a foreign language that he thinks he should know, and you don’t think he’s a bit unnerved by you?”

“But he couldn’t rationally think I’d want his job,” said Kate. “My job is way more fun.”

“First of all, your boss doesn’t necessarily know what you want,” I began, “and anyway if he’s fearful, he wouldn’t believe you if you said you don’t want his job — fear is emotional, he’s not thinking rationally. He might even be thinking that you’ll do all this great stuff you do, and then leave the company and make him look bad for losing you. The guy has been in his job since you were five years old — he’s content in his small box, and you think outside of it. Let’s face it, your kind of person scares his kind of person to death.”

“My gosh, you hit it on the head,” said Kate. “How do I make him un-scared?”

“Very hard to do,” I said. “When your flame is big, people pick up on it. Boundary-spanning, frameless people like you can very easily create a disturbance in the Force when they enter a team of boxed-up people. Sometimes that person has to go. Sometimes something shifts in the energy and they figure out how to work together. Sometimes the fearful boss has an ‘A-ha!’ moment and finally sees the high-mojo person as an ally.”

“So your advice is to be ready for anything,” said Kate.

“Not in the slightest,” I said. “That’s way too passive for someone like you. My advice is to do what you’re already doing — letting people across the company know what you’re capable of. Then, when you’re confident enough, level with your boss. Start out by saying something like, ‘Sometimes I think that my style or my approach makes you uncomfortable.’ Make it easy for him to say anything he needs to get off his chest, if he can rise to the occasion. Be human with him. Amazing, heartfelt disclosures come about when you start human conversations about topics like fear.

“And it shouldn’t be this hard just to do your job, of course. In business, being powerful should not a matter of being smarter or more accomplished than people under you. That’s all crazy fear-based management baloney. The whole idea of leadership is that when you get awesome people, you just say to them, ‘Go be awesome!’ Then, with that encouragement, you stand by and let them do great things.”

“But that’s a real problem,” said Kate. “Now that I think about it, my boss was definitely copied on the email when the VP of Sales invited me to speak at his offsite, and he never mentioned getting it.”

“Oh shocker, Miss Kate!” I laughed.

At the end of the call, Kate told me she now feels a soft spot for her fearful boss. She never meant to intimidate him. And the wonderful thing about the story is that at no point did Kate think “I’ll tamp down my flame so as not to agitate my boss.” That’s the great thing about growing your mojo — you realize that if one job goes away, another one will appear.

Liz Ryan is a former HR executive and now columnist. Liz teaches career strategy and branding to MBA candidates at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and to citizens via her webinar series hosted by Northwestern University. Liz is the founder and CEO of Human Workplace, a think tank and consulting firm.

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